There are valid cases on both sides of this issue. It seems to me that how you come down depends on the relative weight you choose to place on (a) the short-term benefit of restricting the repetition of erroneous information vs. (b) the long-term benefit of preserving the integrity of a historical record and the accountability of a news source.

Danny Sullivan’s argument for deletion is sensible. The screenshot tactic is intriguing but, as Paul Watson points out, a screenshot is a poor substitute for the original data in context. Given the current state of Twitter technology and tools, I wouldn’t fault any news provider for deciding to delete an erroneous tweet, provided some good-faith effort was made to admit the error rather than hide it.

Every new style of online participation is born dangling from a “just.” It’s “just” a tweet, so why bother worrying about deleting it? But every wave of Internet-based communication that preceded Twitter arrived on the scene with a similar sense that it was more ephemeral than what preceded it. Save your e-mail? Why bother? Hey, edit your Web page at will — it’s just data on a server!

Each time, we gradually discover that what we thought was casual has become an essential part of the record of our time. And each time we scramble, belatedly, to retrofit some responsibility onto our practices. Maybe this time we can at least shorten that cycle.

Public tweets play an increasingly important role in our news ecosystem. They tell stories and are part of the story, too. We should minimize tampering with them. We need better tools that might let us correct them responsibly, whether this takes the form of fixes auto-propagating to retweeters or correction notices or revision tracking or all of the above.

In the meantime, we’ll all need to keep improvising. As we do, I hope we’ll all think twice before deleting.

VALUABLE CONTEXT: NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard has a great column documenting how the incorrect reports of Gabrielle Giffords’ death started. (Hint: It wasn’t Twitter.)

Over the weekend many news organizations reported, erroneously, that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was dead. These reports don’t seem to have originated on Twitter. But many spread there — and now they’re occasioning a round of head-scratching over how to handle retractions and corrections in this new communications format.

This happens with every new phase of communications-technology evolution. Twitter, with its speed and popularity and intermingling of professional and personal channels, presents some modest new challenges to accuracy practices. But for journalists there should be little confusion about the answers.

We ask: is deleting a tweet after the fact a lack of transparency, especially if any subsequent tweets don’t admit the error? Is a news organization obliged to tweet that it was wrong? Does the retweet function make such actions moot? We strongly believe in transparency, as do many of you. But whether deleting tweets is a responsibility or not, and whether a news organization must tweet that it was wrong, should lead to serious discussions in all newsrooms.

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

We have decided NOT to delete the erroneous tweet, because it serves as part of the narrative of this story. Facts can change fast when news is breaking, and that leads to errors. We need to own the error, not hide from it. But we also need to rectify the error and explain ourselves to people who trust us. Deleting the tweet would do more to harm trust than preserving it would do to harm truth.

According to the chief argument in favor of tweet-deletion, if you leave a bad report lying around your feed, you’re tempting others to retweet it; if you delete, you’ll inhibit this viral repetition of misinformation. That’s a reasonable position. But there are alternatives to simply zapping the bad tweet and scrubbing the record.

The same technologies that force these problems on us can also help us solve them. On the Web, for instance, publishers can use versioning tools to keep a corrected edition of a story front and center while maintaining a trail of accountability. Similarly, Twitter users can use Twitter itself to correct the record while preserving it.

For instance: say your newsroom had sent out a tweet that read, as NPR’s did:

BREAKING: Rep. Giffords (D-AZ), 6 others killed by gunman in Tucson

You could send out a followup message, preserving a record of the error while correcting it:

Then you could reasonably go back and delete the original. This might be a useful tactic to curtail the spread of bad info. But it still flattens the record a bit, since the original message’s timestamp (and possibly other contextual data) would vanish.

Better yet is the idea floated by “Being Wrong” author Kathryn Schulz (@wrongologist) in this Poynter interview by Mallary Jean Tenore: “Why not have a ‘correct’ function (like the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions) that would automatically send a correction to everyone who had retweeted something that contained an error?”

Such a tool would dragoon the engine of viral misinformation back into the service of truth. You can say, “Hey, it’s just Twitter, what’s the big deal,” but experience suggests that arguments about Internet tools that begin with “It’s just” will get disproved over time. Twitter is beginning to mature into the rapid-response nervous system of our news world. It needs and ought to have a function like the one Schulz proposes.

The biennial midterm in American politics is almost always a time of turnover in presidential administrations. Appointees may be out of favor, or frustrated, or tired, or just eager to make some money; they leave. Elections that deliver a drubbing to the administration’s party, like our most recent one, make this sort of change even more likely.

All of which means there’s nothing too surprising or tumultuous about White House personnel change on the scale that we’re seeing this week — with the departures of President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs and political adviser David Axelrod, both of whom will continue to work on behalf of the president but from a greater distance, and the appointment of a new chief of staff and chief economic adviser. As Marc Ambinder wrote at the National Journal, the changes leave the president with “a different — but strangely familiar — cast of advisers, some playing new roles.”

So is this the big White House shake-up the Wall Street Journal promised us two months ago?

Here was the gist of the Journal piece: “Some high-level Democrats are calling for President Barack Obama to remake his inner circle or even fire top advisers in response to what many party strategists expect to be a decisive defeat on Tuesday.” A perfectly plausible notion. But, as our bug filer pointed out, the Journal offered not a single actual high-level Democrat — named or otherwise — calling on Obama to fire anyone.

Usually, when an inside-the-Beltway story reports a looming event without any evidence, the explanation is that some political insider has leaked the information on background. It’s then up to reporters and editors to decide whether the leak is a real story that readers deserve to hear about (usually, this means finding confirming sources), or a self-serving maneuver on the part of the leaker. In other words, is the scoop real, or is the press being manipulated?

Unfortunately, all the incentives in our current media environment push the newsroom to publish the rumor either way. Doing so seizes attention and stirs discussion. If it turns out to be a real story, great; if it turns out to be part of some manipulative corridors-of-power kabuki, well, so what? Your news organization will rarely pay a price for donning a mask and assuming a role in that shadow play. The world will forget and move on.

In this case, if Obama, fast on the heels of the election, had announced an administration-insiders’ bloodbath, firing people like Axelrod and confidante Valerie Jarrett, then the Journal could credibly say, “See? We got the story right. Sorry we couldn’t tell you how at the time!” Media critics might still bridle at the story’s technique, but the newspaper could reasonably argue that the public interest was served.

But the shake-up never materialized. There was no chorus of Democratic party establishment types demanding one. Instead, there’s just been some standard-issue midterm turnover — which the Journal, like other news organizations, has covered without reference to its previous story. And we’ll never know who, exactly, was trying to serve what purpose in the days before the election of spreading a portrait of infighting in the West Wing.

After some effort on MediaBugs’ part, we received a response from the Journal’s assistant managing editor to the MediaBugs report. She disputed its premise, maintaining that the story was “solid and complete.” That’s where the issue stands; we’ve closed the bug out (as we do after two months) as “unresolved.”

MediaBugs itself doesn’t offer a ruling on “who’s right.” If you’re interested, you can go read the Journal story, read the bug report, and decide for yourself.

This process may not provide satisfaction to the critics of a media report or vindication for the journalists involved. But it does leave what I think is a useful and valuable public record of the disagreement, more organized and authoritative than a simple blog post. Over time, a repository of such records might restore some accountability for misconceived stories — and even begin to reverse the tide of public distrust in the media.

Our Report an Error Alliance has won a couple of great endorsements. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has recommended that NPR implement a Report an Error button. And at the NewsFoo conference last weekend in Phoenix, a by-invitation gathering of journalists and digital innovators, Tim O’Reilly told people that Report an Error was “the most important thing” he’d seen at the event. (Grin!)

At NewsFoo, I got the chance to talk about both MediaBugs and Report an Error. I did also hear some thoughtful criticisms of the Report an Error effort, and I’d like to record them here and respond to them. (I’ll do my best to present these perspectives fairly, but I’m working from memory and paraphrasing.)

(1) The messaging is off. One participant felt that the whole “Report an Error” button concept gets the conversation between a media outlet and a reader off on the wrong foot. Why would a media outlet want to open the discussion by saying, “Tell me what I did wrong?” Why would a publisher put a big red-and-black “X” on the page?

Well, the icon is only big on our Report an Error Alliance home page — on most news pages, it will be as tiny as a “print” or “share” icon, and we have monochrome versions of it for anyone who finds the red-and-black scheme a turnoff. (I kinda like it, but of course it’s a matter of taste.)

More importantly, here’s why we chose to go with “report an error” rather than something vaguer like “send feedback” or “tell us how we’re doing”: “Report an error” is blunt and specific — and we believe that’s good! It says, forthrightly, “We know we make mistakes, and we definitely want to hear about them.” Most sites already have general feedback channels of various kinds, and of course the majority of sites today have comments, too. Yet error reports offered through these channels frequently languish unanswered.

Maybe it’s a little idealistic to propose that news sites give an interface feature a name that is direct rather than euphemistic. But maybe it’s just good pragmatic design. And publications from the Toronto Star to the Huffington Post (which labels its link “Report corrections”) have already agreed.

(2) It’s just more overload. According to this criticism, news sites that are already doing a good job listening to their readers’ feedback through existing channels don’t need to add a new one. And those sites that already feel overwhelmed by the channels they have won’t do any better by adding one more.

I’m sure there’s some truth to this argument. Handling feedback well isn’t just a site design or interface issue, it’s a management skill.

But I still think there’s value in prioritizing readers’ error reports over more general feedback. I can envision plenty of cases where editors who are trying to make their organizations more responsive might find it helpful to be able to signal their staff and their audience that error reports get special treatment.

Using a “report an error” button is a way of telling the public, “Sure, we want to know what you think. But if you think we made a mistake we really want to know it, fast.” At the same time, the buttons tell the news staff that these reports matter more than random gripes and drive-by comments, and deserve considered responses.

(3) Readers will bombard us with general comments. An editor at one of our leading national newspapers said that he’d be concerned about adding “report an error” buttons because seven out of ten messages wouldn’t be reports about specific factual errors but more general complaints along the lines of “you got the whole thing wrong” — to which his staff would still have to respond.

As someone who managed a shrinking newsroom for five years, I have great empathy with this perspective. But I think there’s a way in which the dedicated “report an error” button can actually be a labor-saving device for resource-strapped newsroom managers.

Assuming that said managers actually want to see error reports — if they don’t, this whole discussion is moot — then surely it’s an easier matter to sift the specific reports from more general complaints than to try to fish them out of an even noisier and lengthier comments section. And of course a publication could always choose to put a MediaBugs widget behind the Report an Error button (as I do here on this blog) — in which case our moderation of bug reports at MediaBugs can help with the filtering.

As for the need to respond to this onslaught: Yes, it’s a burden. But it’s also an opportunity to re-engineer the newsroom’s relationship with its readers, to engage with the public on matters of substance, and to begin to restore some trust in the product of journalism. Surely that’s worth the effort.

Today, you can pretty much assume that any online news story or blog post will come with a bevy of buttons to share it, print it, send it to your mobile device, and so on.

But what about when you want to correct it? Isn’t this kind of important? Shouldn’t there be a button for that?

Well, now there is. Today Craig Silverman (of Regret the Error) and I are unveiling a new project called The Report an Error Alliance. Our goal is simple: to promote a new standard to enable error reporting about news content on the Web.

We believe that every page of news content that gets published should provide a Report an Error button — an easy-to-find and easy-to-use tool that readers can use to tell the publishing site that they believe it got something wrong.

We’re not trying to dictate how each site uses these buttons: they can link to a site’s contact form, or provide a simple email link, or use the MediaBugs widget or something like it. That’s up to each news organization or site to choose. What’s important is that the button be handy, right by the story, not buried deep in a sea of footer links or three layers down a page hierarchy.

Many of you already know about my work on MediaBugs; Report an Error is related but independent of that. It’s meant to be a focused effort toward a simple goal. While the Web has enabled powerful two-way communication between journalists and their publics for a decade-and-a-half, too many news sites still make it hard for you to tell them they made a mistake. Such reports get buried in voice-mail boxes and lost in flame-infested comment threads. Yet journalists still need to hear them, and readers deserve to know that they’ve been heard.

Implementing a “report an error” button isn’t by itself a magic solution to the problem of accuracy and the erosion of confidence in the media. But it’s a good start at repairing the growing rift between the press and the public. It’s like putting a badge on everything you publish that says, “If you see a problem, we really want to know about it!”

When I first heard the phrase “iPad newspaper” — shorthand for Rupert Murdoch’s not-so-secret-any-more new project — I puzzled over its oxymoronic implications. Forget about the, you know, iPad/paper contradiction and think about the business. Murdoch is reportedly spending $30 million on this thing. Could that possibly pay off with a product that’s tethered to a single, new platform? Puzzled, I tweeted, “Will they stop me from reading it on my desktop?”

Apparently, the answer is yes. The Guardian writes that this new publication will feature “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence” (funny, that’s pretty much how David Talbot described Salon when we started it!) and tells us:

According to reports, there will be no “print edition” or “web edition”; the central innovation, developed with assistance from Apple engineers, will be to dispatch the publication automatically to an iPad or any of the growing number of similar devices. With no printing or distribution costs, the US-focused Daily will cost 99 cents (62p) a week.

Now, these “reports” (and the Guardian) may be unreliable here; we won’t know for sure till Murdoch unveils his product. But taking these rumors at face value, it sounds like Murdoch intends to deliver his latest news baby into a tablet-only world. A Monday column by David Carr confirms the report and adds some detail: The publication is to be called The Daily, and it will, apparently, be just that: “It will be produced into the evening, and then a button will be pushed and it will be ‘printed’ for the next morning. There will be updates — the number of which is still under discussion — but not at the velocity or with the urgency of a news Web site.” Wonderful! Slower news — and at a higher price.

First, let’s give Murdoch credit for what’s intelligent about this plan. It’s smart to ditch the original “legacy” of paper and the more recent legacy of website publishing — to build something fresh for a new platform rather than do the old shovelware dance. And it’s smart to jump in relatively early, to snag users when the tabula is still rasa.

For Murdoch, I have to imagine there is also something personal about this project. I’m sure he is furious that he has so far failed to extend his record of success and dominance, unbroken in other media, into the digital world. The iPad must look to him like his latest, best, and perhaps last chance to do so, after the humiliating embarrassment of his MySpace investment and the apparent trainwreck of the Times UK paywall.

But how likely is it that any significant number of people will pay $50 a year (or a bit less, assuming a subscription discount) for what is likely to be an above-average but hardly essential or irreplaceable periodical? It’s not as if iPad users have no existing sources of online news, innovative delivery mechanisms for information, or a shortage of stuff to read. iPad users love their browsers; the device is great for reading the free Web.

Murdoch will need more than half a million people to pay that fee to cover a $30M budget (less if he can sell ads), so maybe the thing will work. I’ll bet against it, though, assuming it’s as the Guardian and Carr describe it. I’ll base my bet on the same logic that I’ve long articulated about why paywalls are a bad idea (the problem is not with the “pay” but with the “wall”).

Why do people love getting their news online? It’s timely, it’s convenient, it’s fast — all that matters. Murdoch’s tablet could match that (though it sounds like it may drop the ball on “timely” and “fast”). But even more important than that, online news is connected: it’s news that you can respond to, link to, share with friends. It is part of a back-and-forth that you are also a part of.

Murdoch’s tablet thingie will be something else — a throwback to the isolation of pre-Web publications. Like a paywalled website, this tablet “paper” will discourage us from talking about its contents because we can’t link to it. In other words, like a paywalled site, it expects us to pay for something that is actually less useful and valuable than the free competition.

It’s possible, of course, that the creators of Murdoch’s tablet publication will try to turn it into a true interactive project — where interactive doesn’t mean “buttons you can click on” but rather “people you can interact with.” If they’re smart, they’ll try to build a community within their walls. But that’s a very difficult goal to achieve even if you embrace it wholeheartedly. At big media companies like News Corp., this idea is more often an afterthought than a priority.

Much more likely, the Murdoch project will make the same mistake so many big-media-backed digital ventures have made before. It will assume that its content is so unique, its personality so compelling, its information so rich that readers will regard it as essential. Yet even if it is a really good digital periodical — and it might be! — it is hard to imagine what News Corp. can do to make it that essential, in a world awash in news and information.

(Carr reports that “Initially, there will be a mirror site on the Web to market some of its wares outside the high-walled kingdom of apps.” I’ll bet that over time this mirror site will either grow to be the “real” Daily, as editors realize the free numbers dwarf the pay numbers, or they will pull up the drawbridge completely to try to force a few more customers to pay. It’s Slate 1998 all over again! Will we get Daily umbrellas?)

Now, I know a lot of my friends in journalism are rooting for Murdoch here because they see the pay-for-your-apps iPad model as a deus ex machina that will intervene to save the threatened business model of the old-school newsroom. (Carr’s column weighs the pros and cons here well.)

If you’ve read this far you know I think that’s unlikely. I also think it’s undesirable. On this, I stand with Tim Berners-Lee — who did the primary work in creating the Web two decades ago.

The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone “apps” rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time.

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

UPDATE: Sam Diaz at ZDNet shares my skepticism. I originally avoided writing here about the angle turning up suggesting that Steve Jobs was personally involved in the NewsCorp Daily project and had loaned Murdoch an engineering team; it appeared to be super-thinly sourced. Diaz agrees. We’ll all know soon enough.

In the meantime, let me take gentle issue with the concern both Diaz and Carr raise about the size of the Daily staff. Diaz asks: “Can a team of 100 reporters covering everything from Hollywood to Washington really dig in deep enough to produce the type of content worthy of that paid subscription?” Short answer: If 100 can’t, then 500 couldn’t, either. Carr: “How do you put out an original national newspaper every day with a staff of only 100?” Short answer: You don’t try to cover everything, but you cover what you do cover so originally and engagingly that people can’t resist.

Come on, people: 100 journalists is a huge newsroom as long as you’re not trying to be a “paper” — er, “tablet” — of record. If anything, it’s too big. The key, of course, lies in who those 100 people are, and how you deploy them. The problems with the Daily don’t lie in how much Murdoch is spending or how many bodies he’s hiring, but rather with some of the central premises of the project.

I watched the mini-circus of media coverage that accompanied Friday’s announcement of the Newsweek/Daily Beast merger, and joined in the name mashup fun (I favor the Daily Week). Like a lot of people, I also scratched my head: Lashing two money-losing operations together doesn’t seem all that smart.

But one question kept nagging me. Everyone was pegging Daily Beast’s annual losses at $10 million. I spent a good number of years helping manage the budget of a Web news operation that resembles the Daily Beast’s in many ways (though, even at the height of the dotcom bubble, we never had a Tina Brown-sized salary to pay). And $10 million is an awful lot of money to lose on a digital-only outfit with essentially no distribution costs and a parent company (IAC) to handle the back end.

I mean, it’s possible to imagine burning through that kind of money on a company with 70 employees. It helps if (a) you have no revenue and (b) you pay people lavishly, throw tons of parties, give everyone an outsize travel budget, and spend a fortune on marketing — all of which Brown is entirely capable of.

Still, a loss of $10 million? I wanted to know where that number came from.

I spent some time over the weekend looking around, and as far as I can tell, this figure has only one source, in a Wall Street Journal story that ran last month:

The Daily Beast is expected to lose about $10 million this year, said a person in the know; executives say it’s on a pace to be profitable in two years.

So all we have behind this much-bruited-about number is a single anonymous “person in the know,” who might be the Daily Beast’s accountant or might be Tina Brown’s hairdresser. (Meanwhile, those “profitable in two years” predictions are not worth the breath required to utter them; every money-losing media company has a plan to be profitable in two years.)

Yet the Beast’s $10 million loss has now graduated from this thinly sourced ballpark figure to become received wisdom in the business press. Saturday it turned up in a New York Times piece:

It is an epiphany Mr. Diller most likely came to after seeing no other alternative for eventually turning a profit from The Daily Beast, which is losing on the order of $10 million a year.

I’d be curious to know where the Times piece got its hedged “on the order of” figure. Is it just repeating the Journal’s number? If it was independently sourced, why no mention of that? If the story used some back-of-the-napkin reckoning to arrive at the figure, shouldn’t we see it?

There’s no question that reporting on the finances of an outfit like the Daily Beast isn’t easy; execs will never voluntarily share unflattering numbers. (If you look at the SEC filings of Daily Beast parent IAC, you don’t get much help; Tina Brown’s fiefdom is not broken out on a separate line.) Despite reporting directly from within the belly of the Beast, media-reporting star Howie Kurtz, who recently left the Washington Post to join Brown’s outfit, offered no help in his own lengthy piece on the merger.

Still, we all could do better when casually throwing numbers like this around unless they are better documented. I’m sure the Daily Beast is losing a nice chunk of change, but it’s not at all clear to me that anyone outside the place has a clue whether that number is $5 million, $10 million or more.

Now that Brown’s losses are going to be mixed up with Newsweek’s, of course, figuring out who’s responsible for any ultimate profit or loss will become much more difficult, even from inside the organization. Brown will get to keep busting budgets for a spell and will no longer bear sole responsibility for the bottom line.

This sort of responsibility dilution was one of the reasons AOL’s savvy management sold out to Time Warner a decade ago — a merger that looked dubious to me from the get-go. I get the same whiff of fear and train-wreck from the Daily Week — only, this time around, the stakes are a lot lower.

When I talk about the state of corrections in today’s news media I use the phrase “circle the wagons” a lot. It’s meant to evoke the defensive reflexes that kick in when a news organization perceives it’s under attack. Too often, circling the wagons is the default reaction in the newsroom when readers raise questions about coverage.

The advantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it buttresses the institutional facade of authority, and these buttresses hold up well as long as the reader lacks the time or interest to pay close attention. The disadvantage of the circle-the-wagons response is that it is prone to crumble when the reader looks too closely.

In this post, I am going to look very closely at one such incident. So be warned: we’re heading deep into some weeds.

Last week MediaBugs received an error report about an election-eve story in the Wall Street Journal. The story’s headline announced “Pressure Builds on Obama to Shake Up Inner Circle,” but, our error reporter pointed out, the article failed to provide any quotes of actual people urging Obama to shake up his inner circle. We sought a response from the Journal, and when we didn’t get one, we made a little noise about it.

MediaBugs finally got a response from the Journal Thursday. I would characterize it as a circle-the-wagons response, and I’m going to dissect it and the story it references to see what we can learn.

Earlier this week I was reading the NY Times’ Media Decoder post about my friend and former colleague Joan Walsh’s announcement that she was stepping down as Salon’s editor to write a book. (The estimable Kerry Lauerman replaces her.)

So I’m reading along, and I see that her new book is going to be titled Indecisive:

Hmm. Joan’s a pretty smart editor and writer, and somehow Indecisive is just not the kind of book title I would expect her to end up with. Doesn’t exactly grab you by the lapels.

A little later I saw a message from Joan on Twitter reporting that, indeed, the Times report was wrong — the title of her book, which is going to be about how the politics of fear are hurting the U.S., is, in fact, Indivisible. Which makes much more sense: it’s pleasantly allusive and clearly related to the subject matter.

Several hours later, the Times blog post had been revised to reflect the correct title:

But this change has occurred without any notice whatsoever on the copy.

There are two ways of viewing this practice. One is, who cares? It’s the Web, you can change stuff any time you like. Why shouldn’t the Times go ahead and use this malleable medium in a malleable way?

The other is to say that we’re now practicing journalism in an environment that lets us change text at will, and as a result, we need to be extra careful about maintaining accountability for what we post.

Particularly in the realm of breaking news (but also in the realm of features, enterprise projects, and in this case, advance obits), we are constantly refining what we publish online. Articles grow as we learn more information, and sometimes change direction if the news dictates. Often what gets into the printed paper (where space is much more finite) is a tighter edit on what we publish online.

… Because our editing and publishing systems for print and the Web are intertwined, we often (but not always) use the final printed version as the final archived version that stays on the Web, the theory being that this version of the story has all the accumulated wisdom of our editing process in place. There are many exceptions to this, particularly developing news stories that continue to be updated through the night, well beyond the deadline of the print edition.

In other words, as Roberts explains it, each story the Times posts on the Web is an “iterative” work-in-progress, undergoing a process of “constant refinement” until it congeals into a (sort of) final form for print — but said form can still keep changing, too. So the Times-on-the-Web is always subject to change, and there appears to be no clear line separating “changes that require a correction” from those that don’t that editors can draw and readers can understand. (Compare the Times’ handling of the Walsh error to the humble Galleycat publishing blog, which saw fit to put a correction line on its updated post.)

I predict this policy will last only until the next major blow-up, when readers call foul after observing some particularly sensitive Times story get “refined” in an unaccountable manner, and Times editors wake up to the reality that this policy undermines their own traditions of paper-of-record accountability.

The answer is plain, as I’ve been arguing for some time now: The Times and other papers should preserve their freedom to improve stories while simultaneously retaining their readers’ trust by exposing the “history” of revisions to every story they publish. This can be done in a manner that’s unobtrusive. Once it’s coded into the publishing platform, it requires zero additional work on the part of editors and reporters. It just makes sense.

And here’s why it’s important: When your publishing tools let you change posted content without leaving a trail, and your publishing culture doesn’t strictly limit or control journalists’ ability to make those changes, they will be tempted, sooner or later, to try to hide substantial and important mistakes. This is only human. No newsroom — even one as careful as the Times — can assume that its denizens are exempt. The solution is obvious: deliver writers from temptation, and track changes for readers.

Right before the election last week the Wall Street Journal ran a story that suggested the Obama administration was suffering a veritable collapse, with top Democrats demanding Obama reshape his entire administration. Great story — only there wasn’t a single quote, sourced or anonymous, backing up the headline and lead.

Just ahead of last week’s election the Wall Street Journal reported that “high-level Democrats” were calling for President Obama “to remake his inner circle or even fire top advisers” in the face of an imminent drubbing at the polls.

But an error report on MediaBugs flagged a conspicuous problem with the story: It contained no evidence supporting the claim in its headline and first paragraph. Not a single one of the eight people quoted in the piece called for Obama “to remake his inner circle” or “fire top advisers.” (Read the story here.)

Over the past week we contacted the Journal five times seeking a response to the error report. We emailed a reporter, a managing editor and a general address designated for reporting errors to the newsroom. We also called the phone number listed with corrections info in the print edition. We haven’t received any response.

It’s normal in journalism to move right past this sort of thing — to shrug our shoulders, write these distortions and problems off as the province of yesterday’s fishwrap, and forget about them. At MediaBugs we’re going to try something different: to establish a record, public and relatively permanent, of this kind of incident. Whether the Journal ultimately provides an explanation or not, we think this will be valuable, for both journalists and the public.